Posts by Carolyn Skelton

Some people in NZ also associate bare feet with poverty. One winter when was in primary school, I resisted my mother's intensive pleas for me to wear shoes to school. I was getting too much pleasure from the barefoot experience, but I think for most folks around me, the Kiwi barefoot thing was for summer.

Eventually my concerned teacher took me aside and asked me if my parents could afford to buy me shoes. I think somehow the message was conveyed to my parents and, not surprisingly, my mother was mortified that we were considered so impoverished, and her so uncaring.

It seems to me one of the great benefits of Winston Peters being Foreign Minister is that he hasn't spent this term in parliament constantly sniping away at the government about targeted immigrants. As I recall, he did a lot of that last parliamentary term.

This may not be a suitable question for the debate, but it relates to issues of Internet accessibility.

I see there's news this morning of Auckland City Council considering running libraries and other services as businesses. Libraries provide free Internet access for members of the public who don't have access at home. I would not like to see this service become commercialised in a way that undermines accessibility.

I was pleased to see the discussion of charging the ISP's for access to online music. It has always struck me as strange that people think they're getting access to music (an TV shows etc) for free from the net. To do a lot of that sort of downloading I would have to pay my ISP for more bandwidth than I currently do.

While watching media7 I then started wondering if charging ISPs would mean some people would be paying for access to music they didn't want. But then I figured we would probably still pay for the amount of bandwidth we used one way or another.

Also, I guess there would be an easy way of the ISP paying the music makers for music accessed?

It seems pretty clear that trying to censor porn on the Internet at ISP level is not going to be very successful or desirable. Then this raises the question as to why governments are so keen on it, rather than promoting computer level filters?

IMO the issue is then getting into the issue of concerns about preparing the way for politically-motivated censorship by governments. Is this something we should be worrying about, or is it just that the Aussie government is misguided in its aims to censor net porn?

First up are various hits concerning methamphetamine, the wikipedia page for the letter "p", wkipedia on phosphorous, stuff on Pink (the singer). Does this mean that NZ already has some sort of filter? What does one have to do to "accidentally" get pron on one's PC in NZ?

I don't have anything much to add to the good and bad points others have commented on. I did like that one guy pointed out the nuclear family/heterosexual message embedded in most mainstream TV news in NZ - i.e. the continual pairing of a male and female host. This has long irritated me.

In a similar vein (but a bit OT) re- deeply embedded tropes of gender & (hetero) sexuality on TV, I was mildly irritated by the chair/interviewer on Backbenchers (on before Media7) today. He welcomed the female members of the panel by commenting on their appearance - said they looked smart or stunning (can't recall the exact word). Nothing that wrong with saying people look smart as a welcoming thing, but there noticeably weren't any similar comments about the males on the panel - not even a comment on Peter Dunne's improved hair-do.